The Red Shoes
Opening Night: November 19, 2010
Closing: December 12, 2010
Theater: St. Ann's Warehouse
Following the success of last season’s Brief Encounter (now on Broadway at Studio 54), Kneehigh returns to St. Ann’s Warehouse with their seminal production of The Red Shoes, directed by Emma Rice and based on Hans Christian Andersen’s enduring folk tale. The Red Shoes is about a girl who cannot resist her red shoes; they make her dance with delight, spin with possibilities. But what happens when temptation becomes obsession? When she can’t stop dancing? When she can’t take them off? Surreal and sensuous, quirky and profound, bloody and bare – Kneehigh has created a fun and menacing cabaret — with muscular dancing, characteristic hi-jinks, and haunting overtones.
BUY TICKETSREAD THE REVIEWS:
November 23, 2010
Come and meet these dancing feet. If you dare. No little girl who sees the Kneehigh Theater’s adaptation of “The Red Shoes” (not that any little girl should) will leave with sweet dreams of becoming a ballet dancer. This imaginative, so-ugly-it’s-beautiful production, at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn through Dec. 12, is more likely to inspire nightmares involving severed body parts, public humiliation and concentration camps.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 23, 2010
Seemingly experimental in its audacious intermingling of diverse performance genres, varied musical styles, and wide-ranging historical references, "The Red Shoes" is actually heavily reliant on the tried-and-true for the minimal amusement it offers. Though hampered by long passages of repetitive, unentertaining silliness, the bizarre 90-minute production is good for a few laughs, most of which stem from the brilliant execution of traditional vaudevillian, mime, and physical-comedy antics by the show’s five-member cast of first-rate comic actors.
READ THE REVIEW
November 23, 2010
Director Emma Rice, the head of Britain’s Kneehigh Theatre Company, has made quite a name for herself with this year’s Off Broadway-turned-Broadway phenomenon Brief Encounter, a brilliant reimagining of David Lean’s 1946 movie. Now she brings an earlier Kneehigh production, The Red Shoes, to Off Broadway’s St. Ann’s Warehouse — with not exactly ravishing results.
READ THE REVIEW
November 24, 2010
The best fairy tales have a dark side, and the best storytellers aren’t afraid to address it. Adapting Hans Christian Andersen’s "The Red Shoes" — about a girl who literally can’t stop dancing when she wears that supernatural footwear — director Emma Rice and her Wales-based Kneehigh company revel in the story’s morbid gloom.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 24, 2010
A strange thing happened as I walked towards the entrance of St. Ann’s Warehouse in Dumbo for a recent Sunday matinee performance of The Red Shoes (through December 12): the door swung open and a man in nothing but tighty-whities and a sweat-stained white undershirt stepped out into the chilly afternoon brandishing a rectangular leather suitcase. He looked around, before spinning back towards the door.
READ THE REVIEW